This essay was part of an episode of The Sunshine Economy, focused entirely on the impact of the coronavirus on the tourism industry of the Keys:
The Keys may be a chain of islands where we love to talk about our independence and resilience. But we're also a peninsula, permanently tethered to the mainland, starting in 1912 when Henry Flagler ran his railroad tracks all the way to Key West.
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For 82 years that tieline has been concrete. Anyone can drive here, speeding across the shallows, hopping from key to key. It has fueled tourism in a massive way. More than 5 million tourists visited in 2018. Only 75,000 of us live here.
Generally, people who live in the Keys don't react well to checkpoints that limit access to the islands. Not in 1982, when the feds set up a checkpoint and Key Westers declared the island the Conch Republic and seceded. Not after Hurricane Andrew when access to U.S. 1 through devastated South Dade was limited. And not after Hurricane Irma when water and power were in short supply and desperate property owners weren't allowed back in until days after the winds died down and the storm water receded.
This time it's the Keys wanting to keep out the rest of the world.
Key West residents pleaded for the city to turn away cruise ships. Then bars in Key West were closed. All of The Keys closed to visitors — unthinkable outside of a hurricane. And now a checkpoint turns away most visitors.
So now what?
Tourism provides more than half the jobs in the Keys. That notoriously high rent check is due. For a lot of people it was hard to cover that check when they worked three jobs. Now, many of those jobs have vanished. Even if it's for a short while, it means missing pay days.
A lot of people are staying home. Some were going to the beach and playing volleyball or to the park for pickleball, till the parks and beaches were finally shut down. Even in this age of social distancing, the Keys will still be the Keys. I saw one guy in a Publix wearing a mask — a snorkel mask. And the snorkel, too. But no fins.
We're coming to grips with the Keys as a place where, instead of welcoming everyone, we're literally turning people away, keeping them out. The live-and-let-live ethos that is one of our defining characteristics seems to have gone out the window. Or at least taken a break. Now you have people posting on Facebook out-of-state license plates, and threats of work strikes if the county takes down the checkpoint.
Living in the Keys means talking about how much better it used to be. It doesn’t matter if you arrived here last month or last century. I've heard it a lot since I moved here 30 years ago — about how great things were in the 1970s before new bridges and a water line opened the floodgates for tourism.
Rent was cheap. Marijuana was plentiful. The authorities didn't just look the other way, a good number of them were in on the drug trade. Sure, it’s fun to reminisce, but real life is more than a snapshot or a Jimmy Buffett lyric.
Today’s tourism industry in the Keys — or at least what it was before the coronavirus — got its first tryout in the 1930s, another time we seem to remember fondly, which is weird because the Depression hit the Keys harder than most places. The city went bankrupt and the feds thought about closing the place entirely. Instead, they turned to tourism.
It was sunny. The fish were plenty. And it was cheap. Ernest Hemingway supposedly called it "the St. Tropez of the poor." Elizabeth Bishop called Key West “nice” but “not because of all this sport and these he‑men litterateurs, but just because it is so pretty, so inexpensive and full of such nice little old houses.”
Those houses are a lot older now. And there are a lot more of them. Some are pretty. But none of them are inexpensive any longer.
No one around here thinks we're going back to the 1930s or the 1970s, even if there have been a few jokes about going back to the Depression diet of grits and grunts.
The road will reopen because it has to. So will the hotels and the restaurants and the bars. Because they have to. The questions are, who will survive here, in a place that likes to call itself paradise, but is Florida's most expensive place to live? And what will remain for them even after the virus is gone?
